We looked at a number of the resources, such the Archive
Grid, Zotero, and the Monk Project.
Archive Grid: We could map and locate physical archives,
search by topic, and get links to the appropriate archive websites with contact
information.
Zotero: Keeps track and downloads information from
resources found online. Captures and collects bibliographic information and
places it into user-created folders.
Monk Project: Helps identify patterns in texts,
complementary to Word Hoard and pulls from The Nora Project and various
databases.
The Center for History and New Media was also an
interesting collection of various open-access resources available online. It
had a broad listing of resources for different historical periods/categories.
For the second part of the assignment, Christine and I
chose to work within Zotero to build a bibliography for our course. We spent a
fair amount of time simply getting the program to work, but immediately began
to see its utility. We learned that, based on the source, it’s going to
catalogue resources in a different way (Google Books versus PDF versus Database
listing) and the information will differ depending upon the kind of database
accessed. We also learned that in working with the tool we can add our own
information if it is not present, create notes detailing our thoughts, and tag
entries for specific purposes, further enhancing the organizational utility of
the program. However, some obstacles
involve where and how you access resources. We began by working off campus and,
as such, were not able to collect the same kind of data by adding sources from
Zotero. Even when signing in remotely, there were still some issues in getting
the program to successfully archive and store PDF original documents on the
individual computer. One needs to be careful about how one adds documents and
whether the correct proxies are set up for user access to protected content.
I feel that Zotero could help in broad concept tracing if
we were to use tags associated with different rhetorical terms. It might allow
a larger purview of sources from which we could draw connections between texts
that might not otherwise be readily visible. But because of the user-nature of
inputting tags, it could be less useful at the beginning of research, in that
the user wouldn’t necessarily be able to comprehensively tag the text. Tags can
also help organize a list of search terms used to acquire the sources input
into the bibliography. Essentially the cross-searching abilities—finding keywords
in the content of all documents stored in your library—mean that you can easily
find patterns across texts. In twenty minutes I don’t believe we can actually
fully appreciate the full utility of this text.
I feel that this resource could be incredibly helpful for
tracing concepts across specific individual texts, pointing to where
connections might exist. Because this is a tool for organizing sources, it’s a
frame for understanding whatever you’re looking at, while allowing you to see the
way that your sources overlap. Once you build a library, you could search
agency and all texts that have that term should appear. So it could be seen as
searching history through similarity.
- Christine Maddox Martorana
- Bret Zawilski
Christine and Bret:
ReplyDeleteYou have offered a thorough and reflective discussion of Zotero's affordances and limitations (at least, given the time and constraints of the assignment and of my questions). Your last paragraph communicates the most to me, especially your recognition of Zotero's cataloguing, sorting and tagging functions as a "frame," and the allusion to "searching history through similarity." These are mature realizations indeed. I will be interested in following this up during class discussion next week.
You gave one example of what this could mean by noting the ability to term-search across all "texts" in your Zotero library. But so as not to limit ourselves to just term-searching -- even though I know we are doing a lot of it! -- I wonder what other kinds of things you mean by "searching history through similarity"?
Also -- and this may be an imperfect question -- do you get the sense that the way in which Zotero is meant to work tends to privilege certain kinds of web resources over others? I don't mean just the obvious fact that it will aggregate what is most readily available on the Web, but rather I mean as a bibliographic tool, what assumptions must Zotero (and similar bibliographic tools) make about how we search (for) historical data?
Nicely done again.
-Dr. Graban